Too much going on? No problem, you can sort it out.

Now it's easier to get your priorities in order

We're always working to make what's already a great project management app even better and more user friendly.

Now you can spend less time managing and more time getting things done.

Drag and drop your tickets anywhere in the queue

You no longer have to click arrows to move the ticket from one column to the next. The updated sorting saves time, and makes it much easier to get everything laid out in just the right way.  If you haven't seen it, take a look: https://pmrobot.com/tickets/sort

About PM Robot

PMRobot keeps everything in one place, making your job easier.

No more information scattered across 7 different tools.

With PMRobot, there's only one tool to learn, and one place to search for all your files, tasks, and project information.

Questions or ideas? Contact us at http://feedback.pmrobot.com/

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- John Mardlin

Take a vacation from project management!

Project management is great fun, but sometimes you need a break!

You might start packing up your laptop and smartphone to continue working the entire time.

Or...

Perhaps you'd like a real vacation?

In that case, you probably need to assign a point of contact to help your project run smoothly while you're away.

So how can PMRobot help with this?

We've built in a number of features to assign a "helper" to interface with your team members and clients while you're away.

All recent activity is listed in the Newsfeed, making it easy to see, at a glance, what needs attention.

The Member Overview feature lets you view another member's dashboard.

Meanwhile, you can use Redirect Clarification to redirect questions posed to people that are away.

Read the full details in our new tutorial entitled "Going on vacation."

Drag and Drop Sorting + Gantt Charts

This week we introduced two great new features!

Now you can spend less time managing and more time getting things done.

Drag and Drop Sorting

Instead of dealing with the abstract notions of high, normal, and low, we now use the Agile concepts of Current, Backlog, and Icebox to give an indication of the order in which groups of tickets will be worked on.

Within these main priority levels, you can simply drag tickets up and down to fine-tune the exact ordering of individual tickets.

Try it now at: https://pmrobot.com/tickets/sort

Gantt Chart

This week we also introduced a new beta feature: the Gantt Chart.

A Gantt Chart gives you a quick, visible overview of upcoming milestones and resource allocations.

You can also see at a glance which tickets have not yet been assigned.

Give it a try right now at: https://pmrobot.com/chart/gantt

Don't forget...

PMRobot keeps everything in one place, making your job easier.

No more information scattered across 7 different tools.

With PMRobot, there's only one tool to learn, and one place to search for all your files, tasks, and project information.

Questions or ideas? Contact us at https://pmrobot.com/help

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About the author: Jason Hanley slaves tirelessly, spending his days and nights devising new ways to make software project management faster and easier. While PMRobot is managing his projects, he enjoys riding camels in the Sahara desert, teaching English in Spain, and exploring the south of France.

Boomerang for Gmail Review

As a "follow-up" to Ramy's article about FollowUpThen, I wanted to share my favorite email follow-up service -- Boomerang for Gmail by Baydin.

I've been using it since early beta, and it has become a powerful tool in my email productivity arsenal.

It's basically a snooze button for your email, and integrates right into the familiar Gmail interface.

At $50/year for a personal account, and $150/year for a professional account, it's not cheap compared to Gmail itself.

However, it works very well, is extremely reliable, and could end up being worth the money for someone who sends and receives ridiculous amounts of email. (like yours truly :)

The feature is use most is the basic "Boomerang incoming" functionality. Just tell Boomerang when you want the email to come back (tomorrow 8am, next thursday, etc.) and it disappears and is redelivered at that time.

For power users, here's an example of a more complicated workflow:

1. You receive an email from Bob asking whether you can meet up next Friday, but you have a tentative meeting scheduled with Mary.
2. You send an email to Mary asking if the meeting is still on, but click the "Boomerang this message if I don't hear back in 2 days" checkbox.
3. If Mary responds promptly, nothing happens.
4. However, if Mary does not reply, Boomerang puts the message back in your Inbox so you can re-ask her, or perhaps give a call or text.

Another feature I use often is the Send Later feature, which is similar to Outlook's Delay Delivery.

I sometimes find myself working at odd hours -- 2am, 3am -- and need to send various emails, like invoices, updates, etc.

Sometimes it might be consider a bit rude to send emails in the middle of the night. What if the recipient forgot to turn off their Blackberry and it buzzes and wakes them up?

I simply draft up the email, press Save, and then use Boomerang's Send Later button. A dropdown lets me specify when (usually "tomorrow morning").

In summary, Boomerang for Gmail is a nicely implemented service that does a great job of filling a void in Gmail's functionality.

Kudos to the folks at Baydin!

Multitasking is toxic

Everybody multitasks. But should we?

People consistently overestimate their multitasking ability.

There is huge power and efficiency to be gained by batching similar tasks, or "single-tasking" as I like to call it.

Email, social networking, and especially chat programs are notorious for breaking focus and concentration.

I discovered what a difference this makes when I was running my company from New Zealand and all my clients and employees were in North America.

There was a more than a 12-hour time difference, so I was essentially forced to track and batch all my tasks using an early version of PMRobot.

When I got up in the morning, the day had already ended in North America, and I was able to get work done with zero interruptions.

This resulted in a huge productivity boost!

As I'm writing this blog post, I have a number of tabs open for related material, but I've closed Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and anything that could interrupt my flow.

I do the same thing when I'm programming. Before I open Eclipse to write code, I close everything else that's not related.

What time is it where you are right now? What major goals have you accomplished today? How many interruptions have you had?

Trust me, give single-tasking a try! I guarantee you'll be more productive.

Keep it simple: Ticket workflow

A lot of tracking systems have very complex ticket workflows.

These are often designed to prevent mistakes, but I've found that they often add too many steps to the process, which people eventually ignore.

With PMRobot, we decided to go a different direction, and limit ticket states to:

1. Open - There is work remaining
2. Resolved - The person who did the work believes it is completed
3. Closed - The person who submitted the ticket confirms it is completed
4. Blocked - Work cannot continue due to an external factor (used sparingly)

There are a few common states we decided to leave out since we didn't feel they added sufficient value. Here's why:

New: This is an an open, unassigned ticket. Why add an extra step?

Accepted: This isn't much different than an open, assigned ticket. Again, we don't see a lot of value in adding this extra step.

In progress: This is a useful state to have, but often isn't used correctly. People often mark ticket in progress and then forget about them. Instead, we tend to use time logs and auto-scrum to track what is currently being worked on.

Reopened: This doesn't seem to add much value over the 'open' state. We track and display the number of times a ticket has been reopened, but don't feel it requires a separate state.

What about your process? Do you use states I haven't listed here? Tell us about your experience with ticket workflow.

You have to spend time to make time

"We're too busy to try something new."

Trust me, I completely understand.

Syllogistic Software used to have project information scattered across 5 different systems.

I would spend 8 hours a day emailing, and copying stuff back and forth.

There had to be a better way!

We invested hundreds of hours testing and tweaking a system to track and automate the repetitive stuff.

Soon, it took only 2 hours a day to manage the same number of projects!

Now you can benefit from this same system.

Think carefully about how much time you'll spend today doing manual project management tasks that could be automated.

Each month you delay, you could be wasting 100+ hours of billable time!

So spend some time today, and make time for tomorrow...

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Ready to invest the time, but not sure how to get started? Post your questions here, visit PMRobot.com, or email me directly at jhanley@pmrobot.com.